Banh mi in winter
Early 2000’s, The Koala and I arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam at 6am local time during the coldest month of the year. We’d just flown in from balmy Kuala Lumpur and had been awake for at 24 hours. We weren’t prepared for the cold but we dumped our stuff at our hotel and went exploring. The city was wide awake, bright and bustling. Big baskets of bread stacked on the footpath and banh mi sellers bundled up and huddled together like winter birds cozied up on a branch. What is banh mi? For those unfamiliar with banh mi, the word “banh mi” (pronounced BUN-mee) just means “bread” in Vietnamese but has come to mean a single serve baguette sandwich. The French colonials left behind baguettes and pate when they left Vietnam in the 1950s and the locals created this awesome fusion sandwich before fusion was a thing. Stuffed with pork or chicken, pate, mayo, cucumber, coriander (cilantro), pickled vegetables and sometimes chillies, they are made fresh to order so you get to choose (in our case point) the …